Hi! I'm not sure if anyone's interested, but I've been silent for a while, and I'm going to try to be more regular in my posts--at least once a week. My problem is, I get about halfway through writing a new post and then determine it's awful. I'm going to go back and finish a few anyway.

The article:

Everyone who watches game trailers, reads game reviews, pre-orders a game, or just buys one on impulse, will inevitably have some expectations for that game. If it's an action game, they want action, if it's an adventure game, they want adventure, and if its an art game, they want art. However, there is an enormous dissonance between what we envision a game to be and what it actually is when we play it. Call me pessimistic, but almost all games I've ever had expectations for have in someway let me down or delivered experiences dissimilar to what was advertised (not always in major ways, but noticeable nonetheless). And yet, with every new trailer, with every new developer interview and journalistic review, I'm excited, and not unjustifiably.

The Best of Us

Playing The Last of Us, the Internet's present ubiquity, at first I felt let down. Although it was good, something about it was not quite what I'd been promised; it featured everything I'd expected from the trailers, but unfortunately I mean everything; hardly any of the mechanics were new to me, unexpected. But then, once I grasped the game enough for me get past the limited combat abilities and not-completely intuitive gameplay, I was able to experience the truly great innovations Naughty Dog so masterfully assembled. In the end, The Last of Us delivered on every promise, and then some. The game demonstrated how well the medium can tell a story and make an emotional statement. If this were the last game I'd ever play, I would leave gaming with a heavy heart.

Despite myself, every time I see a new Call of Duty TV spot or read another 8.0 triple-A review, I find myself contemplating the possibilities of the game: A mech game? This one will finally break the mold--my mind goes wild with scenarios. Maybe when the cockpit is destroyed, your HUD goes down, and you have to navigate with a modified control scheme, and damage is dynamically rendered, and every bullet is distinctly modeled, and, and, and. The reason I can have these lofty fantasies is because games like The Last of Us exist. They are diamonds amidst a comparative sea of sapphires and rubies.

That's the article. Continue reading for my game developer spotlight.

Now I want to take some time to raise awareness of some great games. Not good, or very, very good games, but great ones.

Jonas Kyratzes had his start designing free online games. His games are deep, but you don't need to have a Ph.D. in literature to understand them. At the same time, don't mistake them for childish, they are mature, fun games. I suggest you take a look at The Fabulous Screech. It's part of his Lands of Dream series, it's free, and won't take more than 20 minutes of you're time. My favorite of his is The Book of Living Magic, also part of the Lands of Dream, and it also only takes a little bit to complete. If you feel like plopping down ten bucks, his newest game, which is very, very good, The Sea Will Claim Everything, is much more extensive than anything he's done before. Also, the music in these games is second only to Braid(another game you must check out, if you haven't already).

Those are the only games I'm going to discuss this week; maybe I can make this a weekly thing.

If you're still not convinced that your life has led up to this one moment in which you will check out a Jonas Kyratzes game, here are some words in quotation:

"For those looking for an adventure with a sense of wonder, The Sea Will Claim Everything is a must-have."
- Adventure Gamers

"The Book of Living Magic is a strangely trippy jaunt into a world filled with unusual creatures, brilliant prose, pop-culture and visuals straight out of a child’s fevered dreams. It’s, in a word, awesome."
- Cassandra Khaw, IndieGames.com

"It’s funny and personal and surprising and beautiful, and I think you guys will like it a lot."
- Terry Cavanagh (VVVVVV)

Everyone has one, the reason you play video games. When you pick up that controller or lay your hands on the keyboard, what are you thinking? What are you expecting? I pose this question at a time when I am feeling particularly introspective and reflective. We are at an apex of change in the video gaming world, in scales both small and large. On the day-to-day level, we are approaching E3, the traditional peak of video game revolution, and on the macroscopic plane, we are going through an upheaval. Personally, I expect games to offer things I never have before, and the very reasons I play games is changing.

Even a year or two ago, I looked at large companies like Bioware, Bethesda, and many others to deliver my gaming revelations, but now I, like many other people, am beginning to turn towards the indie scene for those new experiences that most triple-A titles just don’t offer anymore. Of course, there are some exceptions: Rockstar and Naughty Dog, for example.

I’m sorry for the vagueness. I can’t offer many specifics; this is just a hazy feeling beginning to come into focus for me. I want to know: Are you feeling the same? Do the games you used to rely on just not “do it” for you anymore? Do you expect something more?

Maybe I’ll be able to better explain myself in the future. Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about, but I think you do. I think you, like I, are becoming disillusioned to stock and store, the norm, the standard.

“Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.” -Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

I’ve been playing a little bit of Don’t Starve recently, a new indie game with a great aesthetic style and an awesome sense of creepy cartoon mystery. Though it is part of the new survival game wave derived from Minecraft’s popularity (I’m not lamenting this wave, only pointing it out), Don’t Starve is very distinct and much more stylistically realized than these games. One prime example of this point is the game’s use of permanent death.

The game isn’t cruel in its use of permanent death, like DayZ or many permadeath MMOs, and I think its distance from titles like Dark Souls in this respect is what makes it groundbreaking in its own right. That is, its relative forgiveness of the player demonstrates that games can utilize permanent death without alienating all but the most hardcore players.

Permadeath has its roots in the inception of video games. Anyone who has played Berzerk can tell you early video games did not skimp on their ability to mercilessly, and sometimes unfairly, send you to your final resting place. The first video game designers probably figured it was natural to only give the player one life, because that’s how we perceive death: ultimately as a singular event. That being said, even Space Invaders allowed three lives to the player, and video games have existed for much longer with the notion of respawns than without. Many modern video games even represent lives on-screen as coins, available for the spending.

The most terrifying moment in video game history.

In recent years, the rise of cinematic elements, a focus on story, and many new revolutionary mechanics has led to developers lessening the challenge of these games in order to allow the player to fully experience what they’ve laboriously created, and that means treating respawns as less a commodity, and more a ubiquity. Limbo and Super Meat Boy are great examples of this change. These games require you to die many, many times. Life tallies have been removed and loading screens have been eliminated.

Hold on, didn’t Berserk also require you to die many, many times to hone your skills and figure out how to make it further in the game? If you realize that the player’s experience of the game was not limited to the one life they had spent—that he would compound their experience with their next twenty-five cents—you would figure that the player really does have an infinite set of lives and an infinite number of experiences. However, even here there is some grey-area, because in every game, even those with permanent death, you can simply restart. The difference, though, is the price you pay to resurrect. In Berserk, it’s a quarter, in OregonTrail it’s the time you invest to play it all again. But, in Limbo, the developers have gone out of their way to make sure the cost is as little as possible by determining the ideal placement of respawn points and by placing these checkpoints often.

Oregon Trail’s purist use of permanent death is about as close as games can come to implementing this feature. That is, what more can games do upon your death than revert you to the start menu? Unless the game decides to ban you from play or otherwise meaningfully punish you for losing, that is. Tangentially, this idea reminds me of the excellent Half-Life 2 mod, The Stanley Parable. At one point in its branching story, as the protagonist faces imminent death, the narrator screams a warning: “Exit the game now, that’s the only way you can win” (I’m paraphrasing). The Stanley Parable acknowledges that the player’s experience of the game is not a closed system confined to the game. Perhaps even we, as players, haven’t yet made this realization. If we had, would we feel so attached? Would we be less reluctant to sacrifice Mordin or Garrus in Mass Effect 2 if we had the knowledge ‘If this doesn’t work, I can try again’?

Mass Effect 2’s narrative branching, which can involve character death, in this way at least acknowledges death’s impact as a useful trope, but between dialogue choices, a combat death still results in a quick loading screen and a respawn. Other triple-A games usually avoid the issue. Skyrim has attempted to reduce death penalties in suite of Limbo, which is a great indication of how games treat death as a whole: as a mild punishment both useful to the developer and regarded apathetically by the player. The recent Bioshock Infinite’s approach to death is an evolution of Skyrim’s death policy in that it uses the traditional ‘you die, you respawn’ technique merged with a mild in-game punishment. Furthermore, Infinite acknowledges your death as actually having happened: when you die, Elizabeth resuscitates you in some hidden corner of the scene in which you died, and you pay a small fine. While I believe Infinite’s approach is much better than no approach at all, more than offering a solution, it merely points to the problem. I am no more satisfied at its tactic of reconciling the in-game world and my world, and when Booker dies, I feel apathy. In fact, Infinite is the extreme of Skyrim’s lax approach to death, and even more a continuation of Limbo’s. For example, when you fall off a ledge, you’re instantly transported back without even a loading screen. I would have at least liked an acknowledgement of the ramifications of Booker’s death a la Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Heavy Rain is one of few games that treats death in the same ways as novels and movies. When a character dies, he is gone for good. Unlike a novel, that death is a direct result of the player’s shortcomings as a player. Because of this design decision, I am genuinely scared of making a mistake, and I discover the characters come alive on a personal level far more than the infinitely better voice acted ones from Uncharted 3, who don’t benefit from an inclusion of permadeath.

While I realize Call of Duty will always require readily available respawns, and games like Limbo can actually take advantage of them to do something otherwise impossible, and there might even eventually be a game that uses respawns to examine death in some new angle, I’m not convinced most games utilize it well. Even if games eventually realize that the way we approach death now is the best way to do it, it’s important to have analyzed deaths and make sure we implement it this way for the right reasons, not because we haven’t thought about it.

I preordered SimCity half a year before it came out. In those months, the internet was divided between those who recognized the numerous game-ruining problems it appeared to be compromised of, and those who didn’t care, or were too ignorant to be aware of them.

I know my story is one of hundreds of thousands of others with the same one. This article has been written a thousand times and has made it to every corner of the internet; even to mainstream news channels have heard it in some form of its many variations.

The afternoon it arrived, the entirety of my will was focused on SimCity. For half an hour, I installed the game, for an hour I downloaded the out-of-the-box update, and for four hours I connected to the first server. I felt like destroying the game entirely, disk and all. I began building my first city. I’m not ashamed to admit I was having a blast. The game crashed. Half an hour later, when I could get back on, and I reloaded the save, but the city was gone. I started a new city.

In itself, the game is a mess; traffic problems, resource glitches, unintentionally limited city sizes, DRM.

My second city had some order; I had figured out how to build effectively with the intuitive road tools. The game crashed.

Reboot a ten year old game, give it a slick UI, focus on deep gameplay, actual tracking of simulated entities working together to create a real, unfiltered embodiment of a city. It should have worked.

By now, you might be confused. The title of this article is ‘a defense’ of SimCity, isn’t it? Furthermore, the problems are fixed, right? Righ—no.

My third city was more or less the same as my second was and my fourth would be. My fifth would have to wait until tomorrow.

Today, a month after SimCIty was released; I’ve played the game thoroughly. In that time, I’ve had trouble forming any opinion about it at all. I love the design when it works; I hate the designers when it fails. This statement seems wishy-washy and weak. But, as a whole, it’s impossible to have a singular succinct opinion about the game, because it is the product of a great developer who was stymied through no fault of their own.

I&#Array;m not sure I agree with this...

Oh great, you say, another EA hate message.

That’s exactly what this is. If you came to this article out of curiosity, and found that you’ve already read the story before, proceeded only in hope of more bashing of SimCity, I invite you to leave, you’ve had your fun. Or, better yet, stay, I haven’t yet said what this whole article’s about.

But first, SimCity. If you force me to concede an opinion. Its long-term development must have been incredibly good. I would love to have seen the developers as they brainstormed the infographic design. I can imagine the delight of the truly inspired engineers and programmers when they first saw the little workers as they came to build the city’s first house or when they saw the tiny moving trucks as the house was filled. The game’s simplicity (actually having images of people on your screen actually being little people on your screen) led to the complexity inherent in a real, city. It is beautiful.

Now, you tell me that the game is incredibly buggy, not only because of the DRM, but for hundreds of other reasons: oversights in development, bad design decisions, etc. Well, Maxis created this game, and EA showed up forcing them to implement DRM (an always online connection) into it. I contend this brute over-lording is responsible not only for the major flaw of the game, the DRM itself, but all of the other smaller ones, because the designers were forced to cut down on polish before the game shipped and focus on larger bugs once it did.

I’m saying it’s EA’s fault. This is old news, but the message lies ahead. We can change the game industry’s path merely by force of will. All we have to do is know something is wrong with the way it is now, and hope we can fix it. Do you think nothing is wrong? Are you happy with the last game you paid for? Many, if not most, would say yes. But, imagine if Leonardo Da Vinci was forced to paint under a pointed stick just as Maxis is crippled by EA’s forced direction. Mona Lisa couldn’t have been painted with a price tag affixed.

I’m all for supply-side economics, just not here, not in the art world. It’s already happened to Hollywood, don’t let it happen to games too.

Do you agree? Disagree? Found a flaw in my logic? Am I an idiot? What's the meaning of life? Your keyboard is right there.

What is a good game? What makes games good? Great gameplay is a must. Story seems important. But what is the one factor that has the final say?

Not every game has a focus on story; often sacrificing one entirely for the sake of ease or the realization that people will buy and play the game regardless. These games are the Call of Duty's and Angry Birds of the world. They would entertain with a flurry of successive little victories, each one bestowing the player a quick thrill, not before setting him for the next. When the player racks up a kill in Call of Duty, achieves a high score in Angry Birds, or makes any small accomplishment in a comparable game, they biologically feel a release of endorphins, not
unlike the feel of real life gambling, which gives the player a simply 'good' felling, perpetuating the cycle. Win. Endorphins. Win. More Endorphins. The dependency on this real life drug is so easily procured from playing these games that the gamer has no need to do anything but play them. It is the true accomplishment of the companies responsible to have perfected the art of the 'Win' (though Charlie Sheen sure has done his part). It is my understanding that the only virtue of a game is the swift concession of these victories, and the prompt delivery of endorphins to the brain.

In the likelihood that I am wrong, I note the fact that not all games have great,
or even good, gameplay. I will allow you to look at Journey, a game completely dedicated to ambiance and mood. Its gameplay is nearly nonexistent. It is apparent; this type of game exists in an entirely different realm than Call of Duty and even the story-hedged Uncharted series.

Hmmm: Uncharted. That is a series with near flawless execution of the cinematic and story driven elements, and also features solid gameplay. I notice, though, that Naughty Dog’s focus on the former elements has garnered nearly universal critical praise (Uncharted 2 is one of the highest rated games of all time on Metacritic). On that note, I’m going to bring up the infamous Call of Duty once again. Critics give every new Call of Duty a seven or an eight out of ten, while berating it thoroughly within the very same review, and this double standard should not be tolerated. Indeed, the hatred that many serious gamers harbor for the series has climaxed to a point where it has dwindled. That is, Call of Duty has been virtually excommunicated by the (as much as it pains me to use the phrase) “hardcore gamers”. Why? I’ll tell you. Call of Duty’s gameplay lacks cinematics, it lacks story, it lacks freshness, it lacks all that is not gameplay. However, the general populous still seems to adore it. I propose that they like Call of Duty for the same reasons I love Journey. It seems new, it seems deep, its richness seems profound. I hope that they will come to see it for what it is. I know that for as long as movies like The Expendables are popular, Call of Duty will be. I know that until people change, there will be no change. Furthermore, I know that people will not change. It remains to be seen if that is a good thing. More on that in my next post.

Finally, I have a confession. Despite the antithesis I’ve demonstrated, I do, in fact, play Call of Duty. I can’t get enough of it. I will be buying the next one, and the next. I will continue to unless people like you will stop buying them. Until. That. Day.